Living Lent 4 - The Hen Reveals A Grieving Savior Series

Fast forward to Jesus’ time. Never again would the Israelites turn to other gods. But rather than trust in the LORD and his promises, they began to trust in their ability to keep his law. That's when the religious parties began to develop; the scribes, the Sadducees, the Pharisees.

They thought they were being faithful to God, but they'd actually become his enemies again. The letter of the law was all that mattered, not the spirit of the law, or the One behind the law. And in the process of trying to keep the law perfectly, they were actually breaking it. They had forgotten that the whole point of the law was love for one's neighbor. For them it became just the opposite of love. Stone the adulteress! Avoid the leper! Don't touch the wounded traveler! Cast the sinner from the dining hall! There was no concern for sharing God's love and forgiveness, no desire to bring the lost and erring to repentance. Keep myself pure. Condemn the rest to hell. That was their way of doing things.

Perhaps now God would write them off. Perhaps now he would abandon them. Perhaps now he would say “You have gone too far.” We know better… because it is at this point in our story that Jesus enters in. Just days before his passion… Jesus lets rip on the teachers of the law and Pharisees and gives them Seven straight “Woe to you’s,” calling them snakes… and a brood of Vipers. But interestingly… after this tirade he gives us this famous quote:

Matthew 23:37-39

37 "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing. 38 Look, your house is left to you desolate. 39 For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, 'Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.'"

It sounds like Jesus' heart is breaking over Jerusalem's stubbornness. Will they ever be willing? First, they trust others instead of God and fall away, then they grow lax in their worship and fall away, now they replace God with rules to follow… and fall away.

I bet you could hear it in Jesus’ voice. A bit of disappointment. A hint of frustration. A sorrow… so deep. When will they come back to me? That picture… that image of Jesus longing for us to come to him and rely on him as young chicks rely on their momma… that is what the chicken has to teach us about Jesus today.

Sure it may seem easy to mock Israel for all the times it had fallen, but who among us hasn’t fallen victim to some of the same things. Perhaps we find ourselves like Israel when it relied on the grace of the Assyrian king instead of relying on God. We fail to trust him with our lives… instead we look to money… or look to possessions… or look to our own position of power and we believe these things will provide for us. We believe that these things will never fail us. And we fall a little further away from God. And Jesus cries, “Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem.”